After packing everything up, Shen Mo returned to the car to rest for a short while before entering the labyrinth.

Going into a labyrinth at midnight wasn’t ideal, but with Bai Youwei’s dollhouse, it wasn’t a major problem.

What no one expected was that someone else would be even more impatient than them.

Du Lai and his girlfriend — the one wrapped head-to-toe in black cloth — departed first, driving off in the direction of the labyrinth.

This was something neither Shen Mo nor Bai Youwei had anticipated.

They had been guarding against Du Lai the whole time, and yet it turned out Du Lai had been guarding against *them* even more.

“This doesn’t feel like Du Lai at all,” Bai Youwei grumbled to Shen Mo. “Every other time we’ve met, Du Lai had his eye on my items and puzzle pieces. And now look — he’s acting like we’re some kind of flood and savage beast, rushing to get away from us this fast.”

Shen Mo watched the car’s tail lights fade into the distance, a faint furrow in his brow. “He left in such a hurry — he must not want to deal with us any further. He seems very worried about his girlfriend giving something away.”

“Very likely. After all, we’ve been camping right across from them, and they’ve naturally been on edge because of us,” Bai Youwei said thoughtfully. “And besides — we only actually saw his girlfriend that first time. After that, the woman stayed in the tent the entire time, never showing her face. Only her voice.”

For any normal person, to neither eat nor use the bathroom and just stay inside a tent the whole time — was that even possible?

The more Bai Youwei thought about it, the more suspicious it seemed. Perhaps Shen Mo really had guessed correctly — Du Lai’s girlfriend wasn’t human?

Shen Mo asked her, “Shall we still go now?”

If they went now, they’d run right into Du Lai.

Bai Youwei thought it over. “Let’s go anyway. Since he’s now on his guard, there’s no reason for us to keep second-guessing ourselves either. Going now means we don’t lose the advantage to them.”

Hearing this, Shen Mo said nothing more and started the car to follow —

The two vehicles weren’t far apart, and Shen Mo could see the tail lights ahead.

But they had barely gone any distance when rain began to fall from the sky, a thin pattering drizzle.

It wasn’t heavy, but it carried a chill, and coupled with the autumn wind cutting through the air, a desolate mood settled over everything.

Visibility grew hazy.

Shen Mo turned on the windshield wipers. In the night rain, the road ahead remained murky, and Du Lai’s tail lights were no longer visible.

They drove on like this for another two minutes, and then the road began to roughen and grow uneven — clearly no longer the smooth asphalt it had been, but something closer to the muddy dirt tracks found in mountain villages.

“Something’s off,” Shen Mo said, frowning, and stopped the car to check.

Bai Youwei rolled down her window. Fine drizzle drifted in, carrying the cool bite of autumn. She shivered, completely unprepared.

The temperature had dropped at an inexplicable rate.

“Could we already be inside the labyrinth?” Bai Youwei asked, puzzled.

The labyrinth was shrouded in fog, and visibility at night was poor — could they have entered the labyrinth without realizing it, and it just happened to be this kind of cold, rain-soaked environment inside?

“Not certain yet.” Shen Mo got out of the car. Rain quickly soaked his shoulders. He frowned and looked around.

The environment had undeniably changed.

The greenery and buildings that had lined both sides of the road were gone. In their place was a dense, dark forest pressing in on all sides, and a narrow path through the trees leading to who knew where.

Had they really entered the labyrinth?

It was natural for Bai Youwei to think so — but Shen Mo was the one who had been driving, and his sense of distance and time was sharper than hers. At the speed they had been going, two minutes simply wasn’t enough to reach the labyrinth’s boundary.

Unless… the labyrinth had expanded again.

But the labyrinth had already expanded once before. Could it expand again so soon?

While he was still puzzling over this, a light suddenly flashed ahead.

Then he saw Du Lai and that black-robed girlfriend of his striding over in flustered, hurried steps, clearly upset, confronting Shen Mo:

“Hey! What the hell are you two doing?!”

—